Friday's Primate Party

On a much lighter note, the BBC reports that orangs show an involuntary behaviour that resembles contagious laughter.

Dr Marina Davila Ross from the University of Portsmouth commented,

"What is clear now is the building blocks of positive emotional contagion and empathy that refer to rapid involuntary facial mimicry in humans evolved prior to humankind."

I've definitely seen dogs laugh before, but apparently they were thinking more along the lines of an ancestral primate rather than an ancestral mammal.

Speaking of which, kudos to the BBC for the following:

"an ancient primate ancestral to both humans and modern apes".

There is much confusion amongst our creationist friends over whether we are or ain't descended from no monkeys. The question of "if evolution is true, how come there are still monkeys?" still raises its ugly head on a regular basis (who the hell is teaching these people biology?). So it's good to see a mass media outlet specify the nature of this relationship.

I only started to really look into this in detail after a creationist website quoted one of my papers completely out of context (long story, described here if you're interested). There is a huge amount of ignorance out there, either wilful or inflicted on the innocent by parents and teachers.

I'm am not at all an evolutionary biologist (though many of my friends are), but don't dogs have some social traits adapted for living with humans? Like awareness of human emotion or something? If so, could that explain dog laughter independently of a shared, laughing mammal ancestor? Am I getting too serious for a post labeled silliness?

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